Magnetic field 2 million times stronger than Earth’s generated

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Researchers at the Los Alamos National Lab have been working for the past 15 years on creating a 100 Tesla magnetic field. Just a few days ago the group succeeded in creating a 100.75 Tesla magnetic field–2 million times stronger than the Earth’s.

This milestone marks a record for the strongest non-destructive magnetic field. To give perspective for those who don’t regularly deal in Nikola Tesla’s electromagnetic unit of measurement, a high resolution MRI generates about 10 Tesla, 16T will allow you to levitate a frog, and neutron stars can generate 1,000,000T. The remarkable nature of this achievement doesn’t stop at the numbers, but at the fact that these researchers manufactured a non-destructive magnetic field.

For the most part, past experiments at other institutes have been as successful as creating a 730T magnetic field—far greater than what was produced at Los Alamos Labs. However, the cost of producing such a strong magnetic pulse resulted in the destruction of all the equipment used to create it. So, not only can the researchers at the Los Alamos National Labs produce a strong magnetic field, they can reproduce it.

The researchers will now be able to explore questions pertaining to how materials behave around magnetic fields and quantum behavior of phase transitions in solids. And who knows what other insights this resource could grant us in such technologies as alternating-current electronic motors and power supply systems.

The video above shows the team of researchers initiating the magnetic field, which was a short-lived pulse. Around the 1:35 mark you can hear the magnetic field make an eerie sound when it’s energized.